1
They must not imagine that by always telling me to be humble they will finally force me to be false, to retract what I think and to say what I do not think.
Your writings full of prejudices, of partiality, of bile are personal attacks1; they are not censures but satires, the most openly avowed enemy would judge with less passion. Based on your Pastoral Letter, based on this strange indictment, I myself would have been horrified by my book if I had not been acquainted with it.2
If I were founding a republic, I would like Religion and peace there. That is why I would banish the theologians from it with as much care as Plato banished the Poets from his.3
Judging him to be without defense anyone and everyone makes haste to give him the last kick.
An author who is Catholic and French the same as crowds of others has spoken in his books about kings and about your Church with a different freedom than I have. Instead of burning his book and issuing a warrant against his person, he was received for that very reason into the French academy. It is true that this was not a poor Foreigner.4
I acknowledge that you need very much to be enlightened, Your Grace, pardon my frankness; but your book appears to me to have been before the illumination.
Isn’t it clear that he would have put his head into his mouth and that consequently the part was greater than the whole. This objection, Your Grace, is clear, simple, and even crude. Nevertheless if you find some good solution to it have the charity to teach it to us; but for mercy’s sake let it be clear, simple in its turn, in conformity with the Gospel, and intelligible to the poor in spirit.
With a peremptory word you deprive him of liberty, honor, you put his life in danger.
But what do I have to retract then? I have affirmed nothing but the existence of God, his attributes, his providence, everything that is essential to religion; doubtless that is not what they want me to retract. About all the rest I have only proposed objections and one does not retract objections, one resolves them. Now if I had known how to resolve mine I would not have made them.
They affirm that I make light of all religion and the sole proof is that I respect all religions. I do not despair of seeing someone who scoffs at them, who insults them, who despises all and above all his own, pass for an extremely pious man.
You deceive yourself, Your Grace, you yourself are mistaken, there is not a single point in your Pastoral Letter in which you are not wrong. Nevertheless that is not what I reproach you for.
It does not depend at all on us not to deceive ourselves but it does depend on us to be moderate and just. Why have you not been so toward me?
What, because there has been a redeemer for men they must be dragged to the torture, because the messiah has come to save them they must be persecuted?
Eh, is there anything more abominable in the world than to put injustice and violence into a system and to make them flow from God’s clemency. Yes, all those who in the torments they cause men to suffer dare to mix the name of the supreme Being are monsters unworthy of living. And it is their bloody doctrines that are truly abominable.
Unable to resolve my objections you have attacked my person, you believed you degraded me by mistreating me and you were mistaken. Without weakening my reasons, you have inspired good will toward my person in all generous hearts. You have made sensible people believe that by judging the author so badly one could judge the book badly; by wishing to complete my ruin you have made me famous. Yes, Your Grace, far from debasing me, persecution has raised up my soul, I feel myself honored to suffer for the truth.
If I deserved insults was it up to you to tell me some? You had only to abandon me to the disdain I had deserved. If I was worthy of you taking up the pen against me, I was worthy of you sparing me insults against my honor which do not leave yours without reproach. What, I am an imposter,5 an abominable man [. . .]6 but how do you know that, Sir, or why do you affirm it?
Sir, I do not at all confuse the Pastoral Letter you have produced against my book with those crowds of violent and calumnious writings whose authors take advantage of my disgrace in order to overwhelm the oppressed man in safety. I believe that a zeal that was more pure than enlightened has led your pen and that considering your Church and your authority as having been attacked you believed you were fulfilling a duty by warning your flock of the danger.7 Based on this opinion, I read your pastoral letter and I believed I owed you my remonstrances on the things that did not appear to me to answer to the praiseworthy goal that you propose for yourself. I will speak to you, Sir, with all the respect that I owe to your dignity and even more to your person. Bearing in mind that I am writing to a Bishop I will employ neither declamation nor antithesis and I hope that you will find in this writing the simplicity that I would have expected to find in yours.
I admit to you that it is not without surprise that I see myself summoned in some manner before you, and that I would not have understood very well on what grounds J. J. Rousseau, Citizen of Geneva, would have been accountable for his writings to a catholic Prelate. But I am being made familiar with stranger things and such new duties are being imposed on me each day that I no longer know with which competent judges I have to deal, [to] how many judges I have to answer.
There appears under the name of a Citizen of Geneva a book printed in Holland with privilege of the Estates General. Because this book is not found to be in conformity with the Religion of the Kingdom of France it is burned at the parlement of Paris and a warrant of arrest is issued against the said Citizen of Geneva without hearing him, without knowing whether he is really the author of the said book, whether he acknowledges it as his own, whether it is he who had it printed. I will not state at all what was done in other countries, that pertains to illusion. One saw the same man who, six months before, enjoyed some esteeem in Europe and even among your people, from the same writings that you decry; one saw, I say, this same man, infirm and hardly able to drag himself along, proscribed, pursued from State to State with a barbarism that has no precedent at all. Asylum8 would have been refused to this unfortunate man, he would perhaps have been treated even more cruelly in the same country in which the atheist Spinoza lived and died peacefully and even honored, having his books printed and sold without any obstacle, while teaching his impious doctrine publicly.
Your pastoral duty was to resolve the difficulties I proposed and not to insult me because of them.
Nevertheless, Your Grace, you deceive yourself and you deceive them, and that error is no longer one of those that are indifferent to men and one that can be left to the Priests and Theologians to dispute.
If I was in fact an impious man, an imposter, an abominable author, you would have done better to prove it without saying it than to say it without proving it.
We are, you say, sinners because of the sin of our first father, but why was our first father himself a sinner? Why wouldn’t the same reason by which you explain his sin be applicable to his descendants without original sin, and why must we impute to God an injustice by making us sinful and punishable through the vice of our birth, whereas our first Father was sinful and punished like us without that. Original sin explains everything except its principle, and it is this principle that must be explained. The true original sin is our body since without any other original vice the first man sinned. He sinned because he was enlightened by the knowledge of the law for as St. Paul says if he had not known the law at all he would not have sinned at all.
Were I a sophist I would not be an impostor for all that; the name of imposter was never given to a man who is deceived by the sole reason that he reasons badly. An impostor is a man who wishes to impose upon others for his own interest and where, I beg you, is my interest in this business?
As for me, I declare, that I acknowledge no other sovereign than the law, I was born free having only the law as master and so I always will remain. If I obey the Prince in the states in which I have the good fortune to live it is not because he is my master, but because the law wishes it and the same law that imposes obedience on me also fixes its limits and conditions.
Hardly any Citizen has been seen more zealous and who knew better the extent of his duties than the Abbé de St. Pierre and I have never said as much as he did.9
Although my book is made too famous it will be less known there perhaps and will surely do less evil there than your pastoral letter.
Although I do not call you Your Grace,10 because you are not my Grace, perhaps I respect you more genuinely11 than any of those who give you that name. For I know how to honor probity, morals, piety, virtue everywhere they are found, and even in my enemies.
Your Grace, I have to defend myself against you and before you. In this discussion I will feel more than once the almost insurmountable difficulties that make the case disappear in the face of persons.
If it were only a question between you and me of examining who is wrong and who is right, who is unjust and who is insulted, that would soon be done.
I have not made any declamations, Your Grace, I have not contrived any antitheses. Instead of insults and epithets, I have stated reasons and, although insulted and persecuted, I have stated them without bitterness. But it seems to me I have proven that you have calumniated me. Thus you, who are made to teach their duty to other people, you are not unaware of yours in such a case. I have nothing more to say to you, unless it is to assure you of my profound respect.
Obscure, isolated, a fugitive, and what is worse, poor, for if I had fifty thousand livres of income, that would already give me some influence, I would begin to be something for you and you would take on a slightly more moderate language when speaking to me. But in the Condition in which I am you can in complete safety calumniate me, insult me, publicly call me an impostor, an abominable man, you can impute to me every crime you please, you will not be cited before any tribunal, you will not be held at all accountable for your imputations. On the contrary the people will admire you, respect you12 even for your lies, will regard you as a zealous defender of the faith and friend of the truth. Proscribed, pursued, stigmatized, having become through your word an object of horror for peoples [he] will not even have the liberty of raising his voice for his defense without being taken to task for insolence and temerity. What does it matter that my life and my liberty are compromised, I am only a man of the people, am I allowed to have an honor to defend, but you, you are a man constituted in dignity whose condition, rights, prerogatives are to be unjust with impunity, and who can never be in the wrong with the weak. I feel these difficulties, Your Grace, I feel them keenly, nevertheless I undertake to overcome them and to test at least once what justice and truth can do against violence and fanaticism. I will dare, then, to defend myself against you after having kept silence until now. For executioners, stakes, chains are objections to which the false and the true are equally without reply but as for epithets and insults one can respond to them with proofs and reasons.13
You begin, Your Grace, by telling us that St. Paul has predicted that perilous days would come in which there14
Never has a prediction been better verified but if St. Paul had announced to us a time in which there would not be any such people I believe he would have made a more remarkable one.
But St. Paul appears to me to cover with figurative language reasonings that are so sophistic that either his books must have been falsified or he must not always have been inspired. In fact his disagreements with St. Peter prove that each of the two did not believe that the other was guided by the Holy Spirit in everything; a Christian can doubt this without crime since J.C. did not say in any part of the Gospel that St. Paul was inspired.
They crucified my master and gave hemlock to a man who was worth more than I am.
Thus you are already barbaric and harsh, let us see whether you are at least equitable and truthful.
But do you consider that the more you extenuate the fault the more cruel you render the punishment, for what more terrible punishment could Adam have borne15 for the greatest crimes than to be condemned with all his race to suffer and die in this world and to pass eternity in the other one consumed by eternal flames. Is this the penalty imposed by the God of Mercifulness upon a poor ignorant man for having let himself be fooled?
I will render to myself what I owe to myself because I owe it; but while not being unaware that the justification of an innocent man is a very insipid reading.
It is known that I have enemies from the evil that has been done to me, but not from that which I have done to anyone.
What do I say, doesn’t the present quarrel over Jansenism prove that there is often as much perplexity among you to determine whether a dogma has been determined by the Church as to establish the right it has to determine it?
One would say that you approve of education beginning by making young people into libertines so that they might have the advantage of subsequently repenting. But these repentances that follow a criminal life are of little profit. Will they erase a thousand real evils by some goods in idea? The monuments of crime cover the earth, the regret of the dying is extinguished along with them.
As a result of enlarging the way of mercy you increase the resources of malefactors. You facilitate them, but no matter how cheaply you sell heaven to the wicked, you are deceiving yourself and you are deceiving them. According to me, lengthy heinous crimes are erased only by lengthy good works, and the one who hastens to repent at death in order to have absolution does not for all that evade the remorse that will punish him in the other life.
Not, says St. Augustine naively,* to say something, but so as not to be at a loss for words. * de Trinit. L. V. c. 9
You make it understood that according to me one does not believe in God except through someone else’s authority.
the multitudes of acquired and communicated ideas with the help of which they acquire some crude notion of the divinity. But let us suppose a savage man wandering alone in the woods from his birth and all of whose time is consumed in seeking his food, devouring it, and sleeping. Will you have the nerve to maintain that this poor unfortunate will be damned for all eternity for having closed his eyes to the light and for not having imagined your treatises de Deo uno et trino all by himself?
The pagans also had their revelations.
To believe them about it they had all useful knowledge from the Gods.
I have demonstrated in my Discourse on inequality how gradual and slow the progress of human reason is, and certainly one must not be dull-witted in order to go back without help to the primary motor of things. This is the meaning that presents itself naturally at the point that is in question in the profession of faith of the Vicar. If, then, my thought were not explained there as clearly as it is, the meaning that you give it would not be that which you should attribute to the author if you were equitable, but the one that is determined by his own writings.
for lack of being able to combat a new truth to rail stupidly at paradox as if a paradox were a lie; as if there were no paradoxes even in geometry, and as if these paradoxes were not demonstrated.
My reason could have been more convinced, but my heart could not have been more persuaded.
The belief that I give to revelation is not a feigned belief, a belief of bad faith, it is not the blind prejudice of a man who refuses to consider the objections out of fear of being shaken by them; who seeks to hide them from others in order to take advantage of them and who—loving his opinions better than the truth—would like people to see things as he depicts them rather than as they are. Far from me these base subterfuges.
I said to myself, oh what good would be done for men by the one who would tell them the truth without disguise, without fear, without satire and without flattery, the one who, uprooting their base prejudices, would dry up the source of their miseries, the one who would make them see that they are wicked only because they are dupes, and unhappy only because they are foolish, the one who would teach them that they are made to be happy and good and what they have to do to be so.
I have tried to be that man; at least I dared to be him, and what is most difficult in this enterprise is courage. I kept quiet during my youth, the rage for reputation did not devour my heart. If I had received some talent I did not hurry to show it; I waited until mature age and reflection put me in a condition to make a good use of it. I believed I saw that use and then I spoke; I did not speak for my profit but for that of my fellows, I did not chase after the ordinary career of authors, I did not aspire to their honors, to their rewards, I did nothing to make my writings fashionable except to make them as good as was possible for me to do. Perhaps I put as many errors into them as they put into theirs. But what I certainly put more of into them is a sincere desire to be useful and true, disinterestedness, and good faith. There is the glory to which I laid claim, I deserve it, I will obtain it, for the public’s errors have their limit and all their cabals will not deprive me of it.
I love liberty, nothing is more natural; I was born free, each is allowed to love the government of his country and if we give leave to the subjects of Kings to speak ill of Republics with so much stupidity and impertinence, why would they not give us leave, with so much justice and reason, to speak ill of royalty. I hate servitude as the source of all the ills of the human race. Tyrants and their flatterers ceaselessly shout: peoples bear your chains without murmur because the first of goods is repose; they lie: it is liberty. In slavery there is neither peace nor virtue. Whoever has other masters than the laws is a wicked man.16
I penetrated the secret of governments, I revealed it to peoples not so that they might shake off the yoke, which is not possible for them, but so that they might become men again in their slavery, and, enslaved to their masters, they might not also be enslaved to their vices. If they can no longer be Citizens, they can still be wise men. The slave Epictetus was one. Whoever acknowledges only the laws of virtue and those of necessity is no longer enslaved to men. That one alone knows how to be free and good in chains.
It is suitable, they say, to deceive the people; but whom does it suit? The authors who deceive it and the leaders who torment it. Am I paid to be the accomplice of those people? Whoever wants to deceive wants thanks, I do not know any axiom more certain. There are prejudices that must be respected, that may be, but it is when everything is in order otherwise and when one cannot remove these prejudices without also removing what compensates for them. Then one leaves the evil for love of the good. But when the state of things is such that nothing could change anymore except for the better, are prejudices so respectable that equity, reason, virtue, and all the good that truth could do for men must be sacrificed to them? What would one say about an unfaithful servant who, seeing robbers enter the house of his master, would let them peacefully make their strike in order not to trouble his rest? If one paid for his discretion with the galleys, in my opinion, one would not be doing him a great wrong.
One vainly affects to despise the people, they have more sense than those who esteem themselves above them, and some simpleton who, with his carriage and his lackeys, talks with disdain about the people he sees in the street, would gain a great deal if he were worth as much as the least among them. The people is not as much a dupe as one thinks. If one did not use force with them, ruse would hardly serve for anything. The way one goes about it, one might just as well leave it there, one might just as well ask very openly for money for one’s pleasures and for one’s rogues as to ask for it with bowmen17 for the good of peoples.18 For they are convinced that it is their goods that one wants for their good. In this, therefore, there is no longer any secret to keep nor truths to keep silent about. The lowest peasants know as much about this as the greatest ministers do. My writings will not teach them anything about the iniquity of the stronger and my example can teach them to console themselves for it. The true springs of governments are in the cowardice of men, that cowardice adheres to roots that my books will not uproot and if they could uproot them they would do more good for men than all their legislators have done. As long as they are vicious they will be led by their vices. When they no longer are so they will no longer be led; it is true, but they will be virtuous.19 Which is better then, that they be wicked and subjected or good and free? Answer, grave magistrates, but be clear.
I will be asked why then, loving Republics so much, I have always lived in the countries of Kings. To that I answer that I have lived in monarchies because I loved liberty. Let whoever can, understand this new paradox, I leave my former fellow citizens the trouble of explaining it. I further answer that the one who depends in no way on what enchains the hearts of men is free everywhere. In whatever place he is allowed to live he acknowledges no other laws than those of duty and of necessity.
The conclusion offers itself. Spare us the trouble of drawing it.
* * *
To believe that I myself am without passion in speaking to men and without any other love than that of the truth, that is assuredly neither what I do nor want to be done. I am willing, on the contrary, that people read at the bottom of my heart all the pride that animates me. I am willing that people see there all the energy of the most noble passion that can swell the heart of a good man. Doubtless I aspire to glory; after good witness of oneself it is the most worthy recompense for virtue. But this glory to which I aspire, and which I will obtain in spite of you and all my contemporaries is the only one to which opinion has not given being20 and which draws a value from itself. All prejudices can change, entire peoples have been seen to despise riches and detest conquerors. Some have been seen among whom great talents were without honor and without practice, but none have been seen among whom zeal for justice was not esteemed and among whom true courage was despised. None have been seen who did not honor frankness and good faith when they were known to it. My own interest is to say what is useful to others without regard to my own utility, and that honor which I alone will have among the authors of my century will always cause me to be distinguished from them all and will compensate me for all their advantages. If one wishes they will be better philosophers and finer wits, they will be more profound thinkers, more precise reasoners, more pleasing writers; but I, I will be more disinterested in my maxims, more sincere in my sentiments, more an enemy of satire, bolder in speaking the truth, when it is useful to others without troubling myself about my fortune nor about my safety. They may deserve pensions, employments, places in academies, and I, I will have only insults and slights; they will be decorated and I, I will be stigmatized, but it does not matter, my disgrace will honor my courage, it will be seen that I did not deserve it at all and that I knew how to endure it, it will be seen that I did not repel outrages except by my conduct and calumny except by reasons, in sum whatever place I might obtain now, I will be alone in it and I do not want anything in common with those who deceive us, not even popular favor acquired at that price. The people hate me, I know it, but that is not their fault; this hatred is again the work of its tyrants: it is not me that it hates, it is what it has been told I was. Cruel men, self-interested and jealous men, your warrants, your stakes, your pastoral letters, your newspapers disturb and deceive them. They believe me to be a monster on the trustworthiness of your outcries. But your outcries will finally end and my writings will remain to your shame. Less prejudiced Christians will search them with surprise for the horrors you claim to find there. They will find in them along with the morality of their divine master only lessons of concord and of charity, they will learn from them to be more just than their fathers, and may their virtues someday avenge me for your maledictions.
Where do these contradictions come from, Your Grace? From a clear enough cause, in my opinion, it is that men have always wanted to mix their work with the work of God and spoil the purity of his worship by a thousand inventions according to their fancy based on which it is impossible for them ever to agree. What has resulted from that is that they have abandoned the essential and have attached themselves to apish antics. They have ceaselessly added, retrenched, corrected, changed; they have reduced everything to formulas, they have put everything into articles of faith. As a result of talking about what must be believed they have forgotten what must be done, doctrine has absorbed everything, it has no longer been a question of morality, and religion has no longer consisted in anything but putting on a mask in a certain manner, of taking a certain posture at a certain hour and in pronouncing certain words in certain places.
Is it surprising that in this condition faith not be in agreement with actions, that one speak in one manner and act in another, that one be a Hebrew in mouth and uncircumcised in heart, that one preach continence while sleeping with other people’s wives?
From this furor to settle everything, to explain everything, to pronounce upon what one understands the least; from this audacity to make God speak incessantly
While always settling, explaining, pronouncing, one has made one’s way
As a result of advancing and of settling one has contradicted oneself one time, and one has never been able to remove these contradictions, because having always made God speak, his interpreters have not been able to retract what they have said in his name. In order to sanctify the foolishness of men one has made the divinity responsible for them, and one has made it speak the most palpable absurdities that had indeed to be received in silence when an arrogant priest
Thus the vehicle for every extravagance has been the submit, for God has spoken.
Whoever says that he believes absolutely everything that we are taught and that he believes it without seeing the slightest difficulty in it is certainly either a liar or a fool.
There are liars who say they believe, and imbeciles who believe they believe.
It is to represent God as a poor workman who is forced at every moment to make alterations in his machine for lack of knowing how to set it up all at once as it should be.
all the miracles he goes about doing here and there as if to pass his time. Agree for example that those of your correligionists are funny miracles, and that if God amuses himself with such conjuring tricks he must be very much at loose ends.
Of all the Religions of the world yours is the most tormenting, precisely because it is the least reasonable. One must incessantly intimidate, frighten men. If you leave them to their reason for a moment you are lost.
But human reason is not governed as men are, it is free by its essence, one cannot tyrannize over it, authority has no hold upon it at all, one can sooner annihilate it than enslave it. One can well retail absurdities to a reasonable man and order him to believe them, all he can do is to lower his head in silence but his mind does not consent. You can force him to speak but you can not force him to acquiesce within himself; he can only lie in order to please you. To convince him one must begin by making him mad.
This is the case of fanaticism. But fanaticism is a state of crisis among a people or in a sect; it cannot last forever, it has fits but it calms itself and reason takes back its rights. It is then that, coming back to itself, it sees with surprise this labyrinth of aberrations into which one has entered during one’s delirium, having become more reasonable one is completely astonished at having been so little so; but it is no longer time to take it back. Religion is established, formulas are drawn up, laws are passed, transgressors are punished, who would dare to clamor against it if the very one who respects them while weighing them is treated this way. Thus one submits to them in appearance, one pretends to believe what the citizens say they believe, in order to be one. One professes one’s father’s religion in order to inherit his property. One does what is necessary in order not to be punished, even more and when one can speak in liberty one laughs at one’s ease about everything one has the appearance of respecting in public. Those who have a particular interest in the thing, those who deal in selling paradise keep their merchandise in credit as much as they can. But their crude zeal deceives no one. That is the system one wishes to treat with consideration because it is useful for those who lead the others, I am not paid to deceive the public in favor of those people.
Our doctrines are imperfect in every respect and our discussions are misunderstandings. For what is more imperfect than Religions that do not teach their sectary to do good and what is a greater misunderstanding than discussions that do not lead to conviction. Those are the great objects of investigations and very important to the human race.21
Various and hardly reasonable Religions will always exist on the earth, and in these religions there will always be people who profess them without believing in them. When these people make up the majority then the Religions become more pernicious than useful, they do not do any good for anyone and their cloak serves to cover infinite evils. In this condition one is attached all the more to the forms because these forms are the only thing left, they have particular interests as support, and these particular interests are the most powerful ones in the State.
In everything the false appearance of order is worse than an absolute disorder.
It is a very great temerity in the Fathers who explained and in the Councils who settled everything to have wanted to make clear what was obscure in scripture and to pronounce about what was unsettled, as if the sacred authors did not know how to explain themselves more clearly without them if they had wanted to.22 For example why this word of trinity which is not in the bible? Why these decisions upon the manner in which God and man are joined in J.C. since neither the Gospel nor the apostles have said anything about it? Your theologians, having the rage of explaining everything up to the mystery, take delight in a certain gibberish that accustoms them to talk nonsense ceaselessly, to be understood neither among themselves nor by others and to explain everything without knowing anything. St. Paul himself admits he knew only in part what your Doctors claim to know in everything. I Cor. XIII: 8 and following.
The one who claims to see clearly what they have seen obscurely is a heretic from the very fact that he meddles in seeing things differently or better than they have seen them.
I do not know, Your Grace, whether I deceive myself, but my own history appears to me to characterize my century regarding the condition of Religion very well. I admit that I have only the proof of sentiment for this, but I am strongly affected by it. The public has the piece in its hands in order to judge about what I see. I think, then, and it is an idea it would be cruel to deprive me of, for it makes up the consolation of my life, I think that every man who believes in God, of whatever religion he might be, will never read the profession of the Savoyard vicar without being moved by it, without feeling that the author’s heart has spoken to his, without experiencing some benevolence for him, without saying to himself if I do not think the way that man does, I would at least want everyone to think as he does. That, according to me, is what every true believer reading that writing must say in himself if he has a soul as pure as his faith. Instead of this . . . let us not retrace the history of my miseries.23 One day perhaps what is the shame of my century will be its glory, and those who will read my book will say with admiration: How angelic those times must have been in which a book like that was regarded as impious, doubtless then all writings breathed the most sublime devoutness and the earth was covered with nothing but saints.
If the peoples no longer have any religion it is the fault of the Clergy, they have demanded so much faith that one could not find enough of it to satisfy them, and soon one abandoned everything. If they had eased up over some articles perhaps they might have preserved the rest but when one demands all or nothing the choice of the one who cannot give all is soon made.
Every doctrine that prescribes more articles of belief than motives for virtue is bad.
How can it happen that all those people so zealous for the dogmas of Christianity follow its morality so poorly, and that with such an ardent faith they have so little charity?
We believe revelation, not because it is demonstrated to us, which according to me is very far from being true; but because it would be desirable that it be so, because we love to believe it, because our heart is touched by the great things it proclaims to us, by the great lessons it gives us and that we would discover with greater difficulty without that, and because without it we would have more difficulty in practicing.
* * *
I who never offended anyone, what enemies can I have other than those who have offended me; but they are all the more implacable the more unjust they are. For sometimes the offended person forgives, but the offender never forgives.
The certitude of moral proofs cannot bear on any facts except those that are in the order of moral possibilities.
And just as people in Lapland would be mistaken to establish 4 feet as the natural stature of man, we ourselves would be no less mistaken to establish the size of human souls on the basis of those of the people we see around us.
not ceding anymore to their prejudices than to their wills, and keeping mine as free as my reason.
A miracle is indeed a supernatural thing, but not absurd nor contradictory in itself. Hence I have not absolutely rejected miracles, although I do not quite know what proof is sufficient to verify one of them well; for to content oneself with a proof similar to the one that verifies a natural event, that is foolishness. Thus I could see a miracle and believe it. But never will one make me believe an absurdity by virtue of this miracle, unless it began by making me go mad. I do not see in this where the inconsistency and absurdity is that you find in it.
In order to understand the language of inspired men it would be necessary to be inspired oneself. Without which everything obscure and inconceivable they say to us is for us only words without ideas. It is as if they were saying nothing to us.
Such are my sentiments, Sir, which I do not give as a rule for anyone but which I declare to be my own and which will remain such not as long as it will please men, but until it pleases God to change my heart or my reason. For as long as I will be what I am and I will think as I am thinking, I will speak as I am speaking. Very different I admit from your Christians in effigy always ready to believe what must be believed, to say what must be said for their interest, their repose, very sure of always being good enough Christians24 as long as their books are not burned and a warrant is not issued for their arrest. Whether I should have kept these sentiments to myself alone as they do not stop saying; whether when I had the courage to publish them, to name myself, I attacked25 the laws and violated public order is what I will soon examine. In the mean time
. . . From that alone falls, with regard to the whole profession of faith of the Vicar, the advantage that is drawn against me from the fact that I put my name at the head of the book. For with regard to that writing26 the author is as it were anonymous, the public can very well presume that this author is that of the book; but if such presumptions sufficed before Tribunals to issue a warrant against a man in a free country where would justice be, or where would liberty be?
I do not say that one can print with impunity every bad book as long as one is not its author; but I say that although one might be able to impute to the Editor the evil done by the sentiments he publishes, one cannot nevertheless impute these sentiments to him unless he has expressly adopted them. From that follows an essential difference in the procedure about which I will speak below.
And what a door wouldn’t one be opening to violence and persecution27 if one could equally impute to the author all the propositions he gives as his own and all those that he puts into the mouth of someone else.28 It would follow that every time he established contradictory discussions one could impute29 to him the pro and the con30 above all when the question is not clear enough to admit an unanswerable solution. One could charge him at pleasure with the one out of the two sentiments that make him guilty, and under the pretext that he had not combatted it invincibly enough, maintain that it is the one he secretly favors. It is that way, for example, that decent censors certify that in Julie31 I establish suicide and attack prayer because one of the correspondents who is refuted by others advances these opinions32 in fact.33 That my enemies reason this way, that is their trade; and I am not seen to rouse myself very much to answer them. But that someone might take it into his head to enter the above as a serious accusation against me in a legal proceeding,34 this would certainly be a new jurisprudence that would never have taken place except against me.
Among a thousand examples, I take only one. If there has ever been a Book that must have displeased the Clergy it was certainly the one by Baron de la Hontan.35 You know that these Gentlemen are not depicted to their advantage in it and that objections against Religion are neither rare nor weak in it. Nevertheless have you ever heard it said that anyone picked a fight with the Baron de la Hontan about his book? If someone had wouldn’t he have made fun of his Judges, wouldn’t he have said to the36